It’s not surprising that Pedro Almodovar’s latest film, “I’m So Excited!,” is being billed as a return to the erotically obsessed, anything-goes antics that propelled the Spanish director’s early camp fests.

But at 63, Almodovar isn’t looking to repeat his own cinematic past, even if his compatriots might wish to rewind the last several years that gave rise to Spain’s current financial straits.

“I’m So Excited!,” a comic melodrama set aboard a trans-Atlantic airline flight on which clothes are shed, much tequila is consumed and sexual partners are enthusiastically exchanged, could be seen as Almodovar’s contemporary version of the Hollywood musicals that provided escapist diversion during the Great Depression.

“That comparison enchants me,” says the director, relaxed and affable over lunch at the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles.

But although his new film, which opens Friday, is, on one level, a breezy sex farce that spends much of its time with its head literally in the clouds, some of those clouds have opaque interiors. When the plane, en route from Madrid to Mexico City, develops a serious problem with its landing gear, the pilots are forced to prepare for an emergency landing.

Meanwhile, three male flight attendants do their best to keep the passengers happy and distracted by any means necessary, including a lip-syncing, lip-smacking rendition of the Pointer Sisters’ pop tune that supplies the title.

Although Spain’s economic crisis is barely mentioned directly, it is evoked through verbal references and sly visual allusions that turn the voyage at 30,000 feet into a Chaucerian microcosm of contemporary Spanish society.

“For example, there is a close-up that I didn’t want to allow to go on for very long, because it would turn it into a joke, of a newspaper article about the 10 most important financial scandals of recent months. And all of them are real,” Almodovar says. “So this current moment in Spanish society is filtered through this plane. When reality sneaks into a light comedy, I always welcome it.”

Connoisseurs of his career may welcome it, too. After his previous feature, the unnerving Frankenstein fable “The Skin I Live In” left some viewers chilled, the farcical “I’m So Excited!” puts Almodovar back on the terra firma of sophisticated, character-driven situational comedy.

Within a few minutes of “I’m So Excited!,” the audience understands that a tragic outcome probably isn’t in the cards for the troubled airliner. And let’s just say that as an orchestrator of spine-tingling terror and suspense, Almodovar is no Irwin Allen. On the other hand, the pilots’ ribald cockpit exchanges in “I’m So Excited!” may remind you of similar off-color bantering between Peter Graves and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in the 1980 disaster film spoof “Airplane!”

The movie’s screwball plot is stocked with familiar Almodovarian archetypes — the phlegmatic porn star, the taciturn assassin, the guilt-ridden middle-aged man of means — who get shaken up, cocktail fashion, by the story’s increasingly wild revelations. The director says that when he began writing the screenplay, he at first only had scenarios and no fully developed characters. But as he began to tease out the plot threads, with feedback from his brother, Agustin, the characters and their individual histories began to take wing.

“When I started to write the movie, it was going to take place 50 percent in the sky and 50 percent on the ground. But later I came to be interested more in developing the situation in the plane and of the consequent catharsis of the characters.”

With more than a dozen characters, several minor parts and a number of nonspeaking extras, “I’m So Excited!” is one of the largest and most diverse ensembles Almodovar ever has worked with. The cast includes accomplished Mexican leading man Jose Maria Yazpik and, in two small but plot-essential roles, Antonio Banderas and Penelope Cruz.

“It was very exciting to me, and it also gave me a little bit of panic,” Almodovar says. “They all came from different schools. They came from television, where they had a lot of success, or from the world of very underground comedy. But I believe the mix worked very well. They were very generous to each other; they liked working together.”

Like most of the director’s films, “I’m So Excited!” is conscious of its own artificiality and takes pleasure in playing with the audience’s expectations about character, narrative logic and psychological motivation. Characteristically, it also takes place in a tight theatrical space from which there is no immediate escape.

But like the high-tech home prison in “The Skin I Live In” or the apartment in “Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!” where Banderas holds Victoria Abril captive, the cabin of Peninsula Flight 2549 becomes a humanistic space where intimate interpersonal contact and surprising emotional connections can occur — because of, rather than despite, the bizarre surroundings.

The end of Spain’s financial crisis may be a long way off. But facing up to your deepest fears in the company of empathetic strangers isn’t a bad place to start solving bigger problems, Almodovar suggests.

“All these contrary characters, the best way they have of dealing with fear and uncertainty is really to integrate themselves, each one with the other. This is the best form of help that they could have.”

(Click here if you are unable to view this photo gallery on your mobile device) The Ruth Bancroft Garden in Walnut Creek celebrates the life of its founder Ruth Bancroft who died at 109 on November 26, 2017. The Ruth Bancroft Garden is a nonprofit public dry garden that was planted by Mrs. Ruth Bancroft in 1972 and was opened to the...